Ever since the Twilight films turned him into an object of mass attention, Robert Pattinson has tried to find his way clear of fan obsession and make his mark as a serious actor. Films like Cosmopolis and Bel Ami helped distance audiences from his vampire alter ego, and now, in Anton Corbijn's Life, Pattinson gives what is arguably the best performance of his career. The 28-year-old heartthrob plays Dennis Stock, the photographer whose iconic photos of James Dean during the last months of his life have sustained the actor's legend even more than his films.

"James Dean is very much an iconic figure to me," Pattinson says. "He represents disaffected youth and alienation in a powerful way that still resonates with us. Those photos of Dean, like the one where he is walking in Times Square, are much more part of our image and impression of him than his films. You can feel his aura and mystique in those photos."

It was an ironic choice of roles for Pattinson who was able to experience what life is like on the other side of the camera lens: "When you're on the red carpet, it's an eerie experience because you don't see the photographers because you're blinded by the lights and flashes most of the time! As a photographer, you get to hide behind your camera."

One of the hottest films at the recently concluded Berlin International Film Festival, LIFE explores the parallel lives of James Dean - played by Dane DeHaan - and Dennis Stock (Pattinson) while the latter was on a road trip taking photos of Dean as part of an assignment for Life Magazine, one of the most popular magazines of its era. The photos subsequently became the stuff of legend and posters that young people would put on their walls as a symbol of youthful rebellion and cool.

Pattinson not only understood something of how James Dean must have felt when his career skyrocketed within a very short time in Hollywood, but also how today's stars - Pattinson included - are so overexposed that they lose all mystery.

"People didn't know that much about Dean's private life and those photos that Stock took of him had so much more impact and meaning than anything you could imagine today," Pattinson muses about the work of the photographer who passed away in 2010.

For director Anton Corbijn, the film also has a deeper meaning in that before he became better known as a filmmaker, he achieved considerable fame for his NME photo shoot of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis shortly before he hung himself. Like Stock did with his photos of Dean, The images of Curtis taken by Corbijn have in their own way amplified the legend of the fabled singer and Corbijn subsequently directed the film Control which depicted Curtis's dark and difficult life.

Wearing a fairly lush beard and looking pleasantly disheveled, Robert Pattison was greeted by adoring crowds during his stay at the Berlin festival. He was wearing a grey Armani jacket and jeans for our chat at the five-star Hotel de Rome.

In addition to Life, audiences will see Pattinson play Col. T.E. Lawrence in Queen of the Desert, a film starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Werner Herzog.

THE INTERVIEW

Q: Robert, it must have been inspiring to play an iconic photographer like Dennis Stock?
PATTINSON: His photos have played a huge part of our collective consciousness of James Dean and the myth that still surrounds him 55 years after his death. Almost everyone has seen some of those photos and so many people including myself have been influenced by our image and perception of Dean and how he represents disaffected youth. Dean is still one of the key figures who represent a kind of defiance and rebellion and someone who felt the confusion of being young and not wanting to conform or stick to the rules. There are very few photographers who have been able to capture that kind of mystique the way Dennis Stock did.

Q: How did you relate to Dennis Stock and his work as a photographer?
PATTINSON: What fascinated me was that he was an artist who was struggling with living up to his own expectations of what he should be doing as an artist. He doesn't feel he's accomplishing enough or doing the kind of work he wants to be doing. I've spent a long time dealing with the same kind of issues and trying to attain goals that I've set for myself and wanting to do the best work possible. I'm still very driven to do work that challenges me.

Q: Did you go through a James Dean phase in your younger days?
PATTINSON: (Laughs) I think almost every actor has a moment in their live when they are either obsessing over James Dean or trying to imitate some aspect of his personality or his acting style. I was a fan of his even before I wanted to become an actor. We all want to look as cool as he did although it's pretty much impossible! (Laughs) I admire his work greatly although I don't think I'm anything like him and I wouldn't dare to compare myself to him.

Q: Would you have wanted to play Dean yourself?
PATTINSON: No! I wouldn't have dared. And I think Dane (DeHaan) does a brilliant job.

Q: What kind of research did you do to prepare for the film?
PATTINSON: Anton (Corbijn) showed me a taped interview with Dennis Stock in which he was very rude to the interviewer. He was always a very complex figure and he had a lot of anger inside because he was very ambitious and wanted to make his mark as an artist. He was very jealous of other artists.

I also spent several months learning to use a camera and work with cameras the way a professional photographer would use them. I took a lot of photos and practiced the kind of movements a photographer makes while working. For a photographer, the camera is basically an extension of his body and he hides behind it while he's taking photos.

Q: Dennis Stock was very conflicted about his work. Were you the same way?
PATTINSON: I've suffered from a lack of self-belief. You worry that you're just faking it and people will start to see through you. So that fear keeps me going and inspires me to take on as many challenges as I can. I was making things much more difficult for myself by constantly worrying about my work and then I started to realise that I just had to simplify my approach and let my instincts take over. I feel a lot more confident now but I still have enough doubts that make me want to keep improving and evolving as an individual and as an actor.

Q: This kind of movie addresses the issue of celebrity and how an actor becomes larger than life. You've experienced that with your work as Edward Cullen in the Twilight films. How have you transitioned past that part of your career?
PATTINSON: It's become a lot easier as the years have gone on. It's not just that it's been a few years since the last Twilight, it's also that I've become a lot better at handling the attention.
One of the interesting things about the film is that it deals with how someone like Stock can block himself and stand in his own way because of his fears and jealousies. He wanted to be seen as an artist in the same way that Dean was and this was a complex issue for him. I've also dealt with my own anxieties in terms of what I wanted to achieve and my own artistic goals.

Q: How do you feel that process is coming along?
PATTINSON: I feel like I'm where I want to be. I don't feel frustrated anymore by the legacy of Twilight and the fact that I've been identified with my work in those films. I knew that it was going to take some time before people would be able to see me in a different way and that I would have to play a lot of different roles to shake up people's expectations of me. It's normal because of the massive success of those films. But in the long run I've tried to benefit from the attention I gained and find as many interesting roles as I can. I think people are beginning to see me differently now.

Q: Has there been any one film in particular that's helped you feel that you're on the right track in terms of your career?
PATTINSON: I was kind of drifting and unsure of what kinds of films I wanted to do until I did Cosmopolis with David Cronenberg. He offered me the role out of nowhere just a few weeks after I had finished the last Twilight film and suddenly I was thrown into this incredible story and playing a very complicated character. That changed my perspective and I knew that this was the kind of work that I wanted to do. It made a huge difference to me.

Q: Is it easier being Robert Patttinson now?
PATTINSON: (Laughs) I don't know... but I'm having a lot more fun now. You need to get past all the things that are holding you back and then everything starts becoming a lot easier in general.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

“Pattinson was a teen-idol. A lot of fans are still very loyal. I didn’t know he was that popular. I knew he was popular, but not that there are people that have more or less devoted their lives to finding every bit of news about him on the internet, so every interview and most probably also this one ‘Hello, Pattinson fans!’ will be translated and then everybody talks about it. And because I am on Twitter they tag my name so my whole Twitter-feed is full.

He has a kind of rebellious charisma and he is a handsome guy and he is a very good actor. So I believe he is going to be really good.”

Koolhoven: That goes through an agency. I was watching some movies Guy Pearce was in and last year he was in 'The Rover' and Pattinson was in there too. So I happened to stumble on that and I fell for that role. It is completely different from his role in 'Brimstone', but I thought he was really good.

Question: What will he be doing exactly in your movie?

Koolhoven: He will play an outlaw and I'm not going to say more than that. It's a secret.

Question: And all Pattinson fans love you now?Koolhoven: Yes ha ha ha last night things went crazy and Twitter exploded. People started to talk to me from all over the world in strange languages.

The video includes clips from the Red Carpet, the press conference and an interview with Anton Corbijn and Rob, unfortunately all dubbed. At 01:40 Rob says (as far as we can hear): "Especially when you are being photographed a lot, you want people not to see anything of you. It is difficult to decide what to reveal. I would never (as Dean) let anyone in my childhood home, never!"

Friday, February 13, 2015

Actor Robert Pattinson is used to the Red Carpet, where he, thanks to the Twilight series, was often waylaid by teenage girls. Now he plays a Red Carpet photographer in Anton Corbijn’s LIFE.

One of the first things that director, Anton Corbijn, did after he had cast Robert Pattinson was to put a camera in his hands. In the role of Dennis Stock, photographer of the international photo press bureau Magnum, the camera, he thought, had to become a part of his body. He had another reason: Pattinson had to feel how it is to be behind the camera instead of being in front of it.

The role that Pattinson plays in the new movie of Anton Corbijn, that got a special Gala Screening at Berlin, feels a bit like the world is upside-down. In the movie the world star and teen idol stands in between the photographers at the Red Carpet where in real life the 28 year old actor is waylaid by photographers.

Life is about the complicated relationship between the relatively unknown David Stock and the Hollywood star James Dean. Stock did an iconic photo shoot with Dean in 1955. He is the man behind the world famous picture of James Dean on Times Square in which he walks straight at the camera huddled in a dark coat, cigarette in his mouth. Stock met Dean (played by Dane DeHaan) just before his big break. A photo shoot could help both of their careers, he reasoned.

Pattinson felt an immediate connection with Stock. ‘A tragical figure really’, he says in a hotel room in Berlin. Would it have not been more logical for Anton Corbijn to have him cast as James Dean? If someone knows how it feels to be famous from one day to another it’s him. Because of his role as Edward Cullen in the fantasy film series Twilight his life changed into a chaos of screaming teenage girls and paparazzi.“Still it cannot be compared”, emphasizes the actor. “People look at James Dean as if he is some kind of spiritual leader: tell us how we should live. They never saw me like that.”

Life is set in the weeks before the premiere of James Dean’s debut movie ‘East of Eden’ (1955). Everybody predicted that he would become world famous. The actor realizes that ‘everything around it’ is just as important as acting and that the studio has him in its claws. It suffocates him. That is something Pattinson doesn’t recognize: “We had no idea that Twilight would become so successful. Only the week before its release we saw a growing interest on the internet.” When the craziness exploded Pattinson found it all very surrealistic. “I had no expectations of what would happen, so I didn’t get disillusioned as Dean did. I see it as a door that opened, I didn’t know what was on the other side, but I was curious and took a look. Later I realized that “oh, this is not going away”. The door closed behind me.

Now three years after the release of the last movie the craziness is diminishing. In the movies he is now, he plays small roles, like the role of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia in ‘Queen of the Desert’ by Werner Herzog or the limo driver in Cronenberg’s ‘Maps to the Stars’. According to Anton Corbijn this is where the connection with his role as Stock is. Because Pattinson became popular at such a young age, he now wants to prove himself, says Anton Corbijn. That he plays a photographer who wants to prove himself is an interesting parallel.

In his career Pattinson makes wayward choices that turn out well. If everything goes well with the financing, he will be seen in movies of cult-director Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers, Trash Humpers) and James Gray (We Own the Night, The Immigrant). Pattinson is a huge huge fan of their work. “They were the first directors I personally approached when I noticed that the scripts I wanted to do where not offered to me, so I decided to contact the directors I admire myself.”

This week the news has been released that Robert Pattinson will be in the western-thriller Brimstone by the Dutch director Martin Koolhoven. "The story is fantastic; I have an idea how I want to do it. It's a dangerous role, but I can't say much about it. And the cameraman is the same one as in in 'Rundkop' and I think that movie is fantastic."

In the meantime Koolhoven is getting crazy of the messages he gets on Twitter from Pattinson fans worldwide. It is hard to imagine all these teenage girls watching a Harmony Korine movie. Pattinson: “I do not know very well what my fans like. I remember that I had to film a scene (????) with Don DeLillo (the 78 year old author) and he was ambushed by 15 year old girls that wanted him to sign their books. Great. If even only one of them read the book, I have the feeling I did some good.

EIGHT DAYS ON A CAMEL

During the Film Festival in Berlin Robert Pattinson can also be seen as T.E. Lawrence in Werner Herzog’s ‘Queen of the Desert’. A small, but challenging role: with the same role in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ the actor Peter o’ Toole wrote movie history. During the press screening there were laughs when he first appeared on the screen with the famous keffiyeh on his head. "Eight days on a camel that is about the only thing I remember. If the role would have been bigger, I would not have done it. Werner Herzog made T.E. Lawrence into a funny person. Also I do not look like the real T.E. Lawrence at all."

IMPORTANT NOTE: When in a personal mail Floortje Smith (reporter) is asked about some details, she replies: “He is very cute and nice. Good in Life as well. I’m very curious of what he is going to do next.”
She listened to the interview tape again and said: “He said that you never know with small movies you can only be sure when you are on set, but he really really wants to do these movies.” About the Korine project: “That is apparently happening too, but I mean… people… different cast and the budget suddenly changes and all that stuff. But I love the movie. It is great and my part that is completely insane as well.”